A New Informed Site To Visit: This Little Blog: A Place to Respond

Business Model In America’s Schools (short excerpt)

In this age of fear and abuse packaged as accountability, with the iron-fisted imposition of the business model in our nation’s classrooms, and worship at the altar of data, at what cost higher test scores? All over the country, it is very hard to even know anymore whether test score gains are really a reflection of improved learning. Certainly the joy of learning for its own sake is being snuffed out.

One of the most important things I ever learned from independent researcher and national treasure Gerald Bracey (and as a teacher during this age of maniacal testing and cutthroat accountability) is that high test scores are a good thing in and of themselves, but they are only meaningful when you don’t attach too much meaning to them. Repeat that. Test scores are only meaningful when you don’t attach too much meaning to them. Attach high stakes to them and as Campbell’s Law warns, gaming and corruption ensue. And much else of immeasurable value is lost. The issue isn’t the tests themselves, it’s their misuse.

There is a very well funded PR machine churning in the dark underbelly of the ed deform movement’s failing schools/failing teachers narrative, most often cloaked in civil rights rhetoric. Even well-meaning reporters for whom I normally have much respect on issues other than education are miles and miles behind ordinary folks in recognizing how bloated with distortion and deception that underbelly is.

The current silver bullet being marketed to the media is getting rid of bad teachers. Indeed there are some bad teachers who should find another line of work and it shouldn’t take years and an act of Congress to get them out of the classroom. However, I believe from my experience in 12 years of teaching that incompetent teachers are a small minority of the teaching population, (I’d say roughly 5%-7% in my area) and many, many teachers who find they cannot handle teaching simply “fire” themselves by resigning voluntarily.

You can fire every “bad” teacher in the country and it will barely make a dent in the challenges that present themselves to America’s public schools, for those challenges are simply a mirror reflection of the poverty and societal ills that our country somehow chooses to turn a blind eye to. We are number one in childhood poverty among wealthy nations. What irony that the very people who have chosen to devote their lives to teaching and working with poor children are singled out and deprecated in the media.